Forecast

Impossible to ignore bloodthirsty extremists in Iraq

The catastrophe of Iraq has been growing steadily worse for weeks, but by last Thursday, it became impossible for the United States and other civilized nations to ignore it. Iraq's bloodthirsty Sunni extremists were threatening the extermination of tens of thousands of members of religious minorities who have refused to join the fundamentalist Islamic state the terrorist forces want to create.

The Islamic State drove Christians, Yazidis and other minorities from their homes by giving them a choice between religious conversion or slaughter. There have been reports of scores of civilians being killed. Many of these frightened and desperate people have surged toward the Turkish border and some 40,000 are estimated to be suffering from heat and thirst on Mount Sinjar in northeast Iraq.

So it was not surprising to hear President Barack Obama announce from the White House that the United States was dropping food and water supplies in northeast Iraq and that he had authorized targeted airstrikes against the Islamic State, if needed. Obama made a wise policy call, and showed proper caution, by keeping his commitment not to reintroduce U.S. ground troops in Iraq, but humanitarian assistance for the imperiled civilians was called for.

Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said his government had begun providing aid to these Iraqis, including dropping supplies at Sinjar from Iraqi helicopters. Turkey, already inundated with refugees from the Syrian civil war, is building a refugee camp in northern Iraq. A U.S. official told The New York Times that fear of a "humanitarian catastrophe" had prompted Obama to consider airdrops of emergency supplies and airstrikes against militants besieging the mountain.

From a political viewpoint, Obama created credibility problems for himself last year when he raised the strong possibility of military retaliation against Syria for using chemical weapons in the civil war there, then later reneged in favor of a diplomatic deal with Russia that forced Syria to give up its stocks of chemical weapons. He ran the danger of compounding that problem if he did not act now.

Obama shaped the issue in terms of a humanitarian crisis — he said the Islamic State had talked of the systemic destruction of the Yazidis, an ancient sect, and said that would be genocide. He voiced alarm over the rapid gains of the Islamic State, a brutal former affiliate of al-Qaida that aims to establish a caliphate across Syria and Iraq that would be governed by a harsh interpretation of Islamic law and showed determination to protect U.S. diplomats and other personnel at the consulate in Irbil and at the embassy in Baghdad.

The militant forces, battle-hardened, flush with money and weapons, have racked up stunning victories against the well-trained and highly motivated Kurdish peshmerga forces. They were reported to be controlling a checkpoint at the border of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, which is only 30 miles from the government headquarters in Irbil. The Islamic State also appeared to have captured the Mosul dam, the largest in Iraq, which provides electricity for Mosul and controls the water supply for a large territory. Should that structure fail, or be damaged in the conflict, it could flood with catastrophic consequences.

Iraqi Kurds were vital allies in the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein and continue to have close ties to the U.S. government. Their semiautonomous region — peaceful, prosperous, reasonably well governed and an oil producer — has been the consistent bright spot in Iraq's tumultuous postinvasion history. It would be a huge blow for the Kurds, Iraq and Turkey, a NATO ally, if the Islamic State took over the region.

After so many years in Iraq, Americans are justifiably skeptical about what military involvement can accomplish anywhere — and the Middle East is so complicated that even seemingly benign decisions can have unintended consequences.

The United States, Turkey and other allies should move quickly to meet the Kurds' needs for ammunition and weapons as well as advice on more effectively deploying the peshmerga and integrating Kurdish operations with Iraqi security forces. Under pressure from the United States, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq finally agreed this week to cooperate with the Kurds and to provide air support, and should continue to do so. That will still leave Obama with the task of framing a broader strategy that involves Saudi Arabia, the Arab League and the United Nations, just to start.